Four and a half months after our trip to Italy ended, I am finally almost done with my meal reports. The last leg of our stay was in Milan. We were there for two nights and a day, partly to see the Last Supper and partly to meet up with one of my oldest, dearest friends who lives an hour outside Milan. She and her husband drove over for dinner in the evening. That meal featured Italian food. For lunch, however, we ate our first non-Italian meal in three weeks. We hadn’t really planned this. We’d chosen our AirBnB on the basis of proximity to the train station and after arrival from Padua we didn’t have the energy to go very far for lunch or the appetite for anything very filling. Google indicated that we were in a neighbourhood that featured a number of Asian restaurants and we decided to go eat a light lunch of noodle soup and dumplings at a place called Lanzhou Ramen, about 7 minutes walk from our flat. We arrived to find a small but attractive restaurant. Here’s how the meal went.

First, the name. It’s not a ramen restaurant. The noodle soups they serve are all Chinese. Presumably the word “ramen” is needed to indicate to Italians that some sort of Asian noodle soup is available. Most of the rest of the menu is described in Italian terms: the spring rolls are “involtini”, many of the dumplings are “ravioli” and so on. The names of the dishes are also translated into English, which may suggest a large international student population in the area (it’s certainly not a tourist hotspot). We perused the menu quickly and got down to business.

What did we get? We started with the sticky rice with chicken and steamed chicken with peanut sauce. The sticky rice was decent, the steamed chicken was excellent. Next to show up was the so-called “ramen chicken cutlet”, which was basically noodle soup with a breaded and sliced chicken cutlet on the side. This was mostly eaten by the older boy and it was decent enough. Then an order of pork shiumai and an order of shrimp dumplings. The shiumai were very good and the boys asked for a second order. Another noodle soup then arrived: the so-called “Lanzhou ramen”, which featured thin slices of beef and wide knife-cut noodles. This was also decent. An order of decent soup dumplings (and the second order of shiumai) rounded out the meal.

For a look at the restaurant, the menu and what we ate, click on an image below to launch a larger slideshow. Scroll down to see how much it all cost and to see what’s coming next.

All of this plus a bubble tea, another soft drink and water came to about $77. I would not call this a very good value for what we ate but if you’re in this part of Milan after three weeks of eating only Italian food, and the thought of noodle soup and dumplings appeals, then you could probably do a lot worse.

Okay, just one more report from Italy to go. That will be of two dinners eaten at the same Italian restaurant, also quite close to our flat. I’ll have that report next week. Before that posts, however, I’ll write up the dinner we ate yesterday at Herbst in St. Paul. That’ll be on Tuesday.